Latest / The MOOD Podcast / One Photograph Is All You Get Now, and Why That's Good News for Photographers - Moments of Mood, 3.8

Transcript

One Photograph Is All You Get Now, and Why That's Good News for Photographers - Moments of Mood, 3.8 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Matt Jacob: I want to give you a number, and that number is one.
• 0:04
  Matt Jacob: Whatever you are making right now, however many years and thousands of frames sit behind it, a stranger meeting your work tonight will give it one frame and one fraction of a second.
• 0:16
  Matt Jacob: And if that frame does not stop them, the rest of your work may as well not exist.
• 0:23
  Matt Jacob: Many photographers hear that and may call it the death of the medium.
• 0:28
  Matt Jacob: Or worse, people starting may be looking at photography as a craft they want to do, but not think it's worth it to continue, or not at least with any serious intent.
• 0:38
  Matt Jacob: Too many photographers, too many images, too much saturation, too much homogenization and digitization, etc., etc.
• 0:47
  Matt Jacob: And then, of course, there's AI.
• 0:50
  Matt Jacob: But I think they're wrong.
• 0:51
  Matt Jacob: And today I want to tell you why that this brutal new arithmetic might be the best thing that has happened to serious photography in a generation, and exactly what I think we should do about it.
• 1:13
  Matt Jacob: Now, this frame on the screen is one of mine.
• 1:16
  Matt Jacob: Years of work compressed into a single frame built to survive that fraction of a second, but not deliberately, of course.
• 1:24
  Matt Jacob: And uh hopefully by the end of this episode, you will know whether yours can do the same and maybe what to change if it doesn't.
• 1:32
  Matt Jacob: This is the Moo Podcast.
• 1:34
  Matt Jacob: I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's really about, and then go and get it in front of the right people.
• 1:47
  Matt Jacob: It's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice because every week I sit down with a guest or I break down a single idea in a commentary like this one called Moments of Mood.
• 1:59
  Matt Jacob: Now, before I make any arguments at all, just sit with me for a minute and bring to mind a body of work or a project that you care most about.
• 2:10
  Matt Jacob: And imagine everything you have made for it disappears tonight, except one paragraph.
• 2:17
  Matt Jacob: No caption, and you not in the room.
• 2:19
  Matt Jacob: Which frame survives?
• 2:21
  Matt Jacob: Hold that because we are going to test it.
• 2:25
  Matt Jacob: Let me be precise though about what I think has actually broken, because I think we keep misdiagnosing it, and the wrong diagnosis can often produce the wrong work.
• 2:35
  Matt Jacob: The capacity to look has not necessarily died, I don't think.
• 2:38
  Matt Jacob: Put a great print in front of a human being and something in them still slows down, still leans in.
• 2:45
  Matt Jacob: The eye, I don't think, has changed in a hundred thousand years, but what has collapsed is the capacity to stay with it.
• 2:52
  Matt Jacob: Attention beyond a few seconds is becoming the rarest resource in the visual world, trained out of an entire civilization by an infinite river of images.
• 3:03
  Matt Jacob: And I'm not going to pretend that is fine.
• 3:06
  Matt Jacob: It is a loss.
• 3:07
  Matt Jacob: I will say plainly that I am proud to be on the other side of it, though.
• 3:10
  Matt Jacob: I think I do sit with photographs, especially those in book form, and I'm obsessed with photography and with art, more so than ever before.
• 3:20
  Matt Jacob: I give a single image the kind of time most people now give, probably an entire feed.
• 3:25
  Matt Jacob: And I believe that patience is not nostalgia, it's a discipline, and is one of the few genuine advantages left to anyone who actually keeps it.
• 3:35
  Matt Jacob: But here is where I part ways with the photographers still writing eulogies.
• 3:41
  Matt Jacob: You do not get to choose the world that your work enters.
• 3:45
  Matt Jacob: And this is the new one.
• 3:47
  Matt Jacob: Almost nobody is coming to your photograph with my patients or your patients or with a trained eye.
• 3:53
  Matt Jacob: And resenting that fact has become its own little genre of photographic self-pity.
• 3:59
  Matt Jacob: And it has produced precisely nothing.
• 4:02
  Matt Jacob: The river is not going to slow down because we're the victims or we feel unappreciated.
• 4:08
  Matt Jacob: So the question that actually matters is not just how do we get the old attention back?
• 4:13
  Matt Jacob: And should we?
• 4:15
  Matt Jacob: But it's more like, is it even possible?
• 4:17
  Matt Jacob: And what does great work look like in a world that grants you just a few seconds at most?
• 4:23
  Matt Jacob: I think I have an answer and my conviction with it is growing.
• 4:26
  Matt Jacob: So stay with me.
• 4:28
  Matt Jacob: Because I believe the photographers who matter from here on will not be the ones who make the most.
• 4:34
  Matt Jacob: They will be the ones who probably compress the best, at least on the outset and at least initially.
• 4:40
  Matt Jacob: One frame carrying an entire story, maybe, or at least dense enough to interrupt a stranger mid-scroll and force the one act this world has almost trained out of people.
• 4:51
  Matt Jacob: The second look.
• 4:53
  Matt Jacob: The first glance is a reflex, right?
• 4:55
  Matt Jacob: And it belongs to that river, the world of saturation, the world of homogeneity.
• 5:01
  Matt Jacob: But the second look is a decision and it belongs to you if you can earn it.
• 5:06
  Matt Jacob: And everything I care about in photography now lives inside that word, earn.
• 5:12
  Matt Jacob: Because most of us, faced with shrinking attention, did the opposite.
• 5:17
  Matt Jacob: We just made more.
• 5:18
  Matt Jacob: We spread one statement across 10 posts, let's say, and called it consistency.
• 5:23
  Matt Jacob: We rationed our meaning out of fragments.
• 5:26
  Matt Jacob: And the fragments taught the audience that none of them mattered because none of them could actually stand alone.
• 5:34
  Matt Jacob: Volume is not a strategy.
• 5:36
  Matt Jacob: Volume is hiding place.
• 5:38
  Matt Jacob: It lets you feel productive while deferring, sometimes forever.
• 5:42
  Matt Jacob: The only question that builds a voice.
• 5:46
  Matt Jacob: Of everything I have made, which single frame can say it?
• 5:50
  Matt Jacob: And why?
• 5:52
  Matt Jacob: Now, this frame is potentially my answer for one body of work.
• 5:56
  Matt Jacob: It comes from years in a place whose older ways of living are being pulled apart in real time, but I found some humanity in it.
• 6:03
  Matt Jacob: And behind this single image sit hundreds of frames, return trips, conversations.
• 6:08
  Matt Jacob: And most of them are just scaffolding.
• 6:11
  Matt Jacob: And I mean that with respect because scaffolding is honorable and of course necessary, but it's still not the building, right?
• 6:19
  Matt Jacob: In this one frame, then there is a figure, uh, an object, a horizon, a building, a room.
• 6:26
  Matt Jacob: And the entire argument of the wider project, the thing that I want to say and what I want people to understand and to feel has to live in the tension between them because the stranger scrolling past will never hear my explanation, right?
• 6:40
  Matt Jacob: Anyone could photograph what this room in this place, this person looks like.
• 6:45
  Matt Jacob: The compression, everything I know concentrated into one image that survives being seen cold, though, that is the work.
• 6:53
  Matt Jacob: That is the craft I'm telling you to go and try and master.
• 6:57
  Matt Jacob: Anyway, here's the solution, I think.
• 6:59
  Matt Jacob: But of course, let me know.
• 7:01
  Matt Jacob: Um, and it may be simple to say this, yet difficult to do, like many things.
• 7:07
  Matt Jacob: Hook a viewer with a frame and appease their need.
• 7:10
  Matt Jacob: Then let your voice do the rest.
• 7:12
  Matt Jacob: The single image is this doorway, this ambassador, the thing sharp enough to arrest a stranger in the river.
• 7:18
  Matt Jacob: And once it has bought you the second look, everything deeper gets its chance.
• 7:23
  Matt Jacob: And that's where you can really work.
• 7:25
  Matt Jacob: The sequence, the book, the body of work, the 20 images that reward the attention that the first one earned.
• 7:32
  Matt Jacob: Now, I am not telling you that the photo book is dead or the algorithm won.
• 7:38
  Matt Jacob: The deep forms are, of course, where my own heart lives, and I'm sure where yours lives too.
• 7:42
  Matt Jacob: But I'm telling you, they have to be entered, and the entrance is one frame wide.
• 7:47
  Matt Jacob: So build the ambassador, and the patient work behind it then finally gets found.
• 7:52
  Matt Jacob: Furthermore, treat a first image as a filter for an audience that wouldn't care anyway what you have to see or say.
• 8:00
  Matt Jacob: Use it as a litmus test.
• 8:01
  Matt Jacob: After all, do you really care about those that don't care about your images anyway?
• 8:07
  Matt Jacob: One thing then before I wrap this up, you cannot judge your own frame all the time because you are the only person alive who cannot see it cold.
• 8:17
  Matt Jacob: You arrive carrying all of this context that the stranger will, of course, never have.
• 8:21
  Matt Jacob: You need eyes that were not there.
• 8:23
  Matt Jacob: And that is where the mood insiders is.
• 8:26
  Matt Jacob: My community that is a room where the scoreboard is off, where people tell you what your one frame can actually carry.
• 8:33
  Matt Jacob: If you want to know whether your work survives this doorway that we're talking about, that is where you find out.
• 8:39
  Matt Jacob: Anyway, the description is below.
• 8:41
  Matt Jacob: I hope to see you in there.
• 8:42
  Matt Jacob: And before I close, I want to return to that number one because I've been using it as a threat, and it is time to tell you what it really is.
• 8:50
  Matt Jacob: Because one is not just the frame, one is you.
• 8:54
  Matt Jacob: In a river of infinite, replicable, generated images.
• 8:58
  Matt Jacob: The one true original left is the individual, the single human being who stood somewhere, carried something, and saw.
• 9:06
  Matt Jacob: There is exactly one of you, and that is not a greeting card sentiment.
• 9:10
  Matt Jacob: It is the last scarcity in visual culture, the one thing that cannot be duplicated, prompted, or flooded.
• 9:19
  Matt Jacob: Compression is not a trick for beating any algorithm, right?
• 9:22
  Matt Jacob: It is the act of concentrating that irreplaceable one, your seeing, your years, your reasons into a form the new world can actually receive.
• 9:34
  Matt Jacob: One frame is probably all you get because one is all you are.
• 9:38
  Matt Jacob: And one, it turns out, is enough.
• 9:41
  Matt Jacob: So hopefully, listening to this and moving forward, take one piece of work and take the project from the still point.
• 9:48
  Matt Jacob: Pull maybe 10 frames you would normally use to tell it, and choose the one that must carry everything.
• 9:54
  Matt Jacob: Write down what the other nine were doing that this one now has to do alone, because that page is a map of your own story and your own voice, and almost nobody has drawn theirs.
• 10:06
  Matt Jacob: Then show that single frame to maybe someone cold, not just on Instagram.
• 10:11
  Matt Jacob: No capture, no context, and watch for that second look.
• 10:14
  Matt Jacob: However it goes, you will know more about your voice than a year of posting would have taught you.
• 10:21
  Matt Jacob: One frame, the entire window to your voice within it.
• 10:25
  Matt Jacob: Good luck and happy shooting.